Navy training harming whales and other marine mammals

What do you do with a bully? That’s the decision the California Coastal Commission will have to make Friday when it holds a hearing on the Navy’s unprecedented impacts on Southern California waters. Twice before, in 2007 and 2008, the commission approved the Navy’s plans but set reasonable conditions to protect our coastal wildlife. Twice before the Navy ignored the commission’s recommendations.

Now the Navy is back for another round, and the level of activity it has proposed is staggering. Each year, beginning next January, the Navy would detonate more than 50,000 underwater explosives off the Southern California coast. Hundreds of these explosives would pack enough charge to sink a warship, which is exactly what they’re used for. Each year, too, the Navy would run more than 10,000 hours of the same high-intensity military sonar that has killed and injured whales around the globe. And that’s just for starters.

The Navy itself estimates that, over five years, it would kill 130 marine mammals outright, permanently deafen another 1,600, and significantly disrupt feeding, calving and other vital behaviors more than 8.8 million times. Compared with its previous exercises in the region, these numbers represent an incredible 1,300 percent increase – the result of a major ramp-up in its Southern California operations as well as emerging science showing that its impacts are worse than previously thought. For some species, like the magnificent gray whales that migrate up and down our coast, the incidence of harm is several times the size of their entire populations.

The most vulnerable marine mammals are the beaked whales, a family of species that are considered acutely sensitive to Navy sonar, with documented injury and death. A government study published last month found that beaked whale populations have indeed declined substantially in the California Current over the past 20 years, and suggests that the Navy’s range may have become a population sink, luring them in but making it difficult for them to bring their calves to maturity. Another California study shows that Navy sonar suppresses the feeding calls of blue whales over far distances. That’s a big problem since waters off the Southland contain some of the most important foraging habitat for this endangered species anywhere on the globe.

No one questions the Navy’s need to train. A well-prepared and ready force is essential to the nation’s security. But as one biologist has said, whales should not have to die for practice – nor should we have to compromise the survival of marine mammal populations.

Remarkably, the dramatic increase in impacts has not triggered a corresponding effort on the Navy’s part to identify better means of reducing harm. On the contrary, the Navy has proposed virtually the same environmental mitigation as it did in 2008: posting one or two lookouts on a fast-moving ship and hoping they can spot whales before the animals are permanently injured. These are measures that the Coastal Commission, the scientific community and every court that has examined the issue has criticized as inadequate and minimally effective. One study found that the Navy’s chances of spotting a deep-diving whale in good conditions is about 1 in 50.